The present invention relates to hand-holdable optical scanners for scanning record media, and also to a rotary encoder useful in such scanners. The invention is particularly useful in a scanner-type electronic translator for scanning printed texts on record media and for simultaneously translating the words from one language into another language, or from one definition to another definition in the same language.
Hand-holdable optical scanners have come into widespread use for a number of applications, such as for bar-code readers at points-of-sale of products and/or services, for recording data appearing on original documents for later reproduction or processing, and for translating documents. Examples of optical scanners for the latter applications are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,393,460, 4,523,235, 4,639,790, 4,890,230, 4,947,261, 4,959,871, 5,063,508 and 5,301,243.